Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers (14 page)

INCOMPOSSIBLE.
Unable to exist if something else exists; not mutually possible. A term coined and defined by American author and satirist
Ambrose Bierce
(1842–1914
)
in his
Devil’s Dictionary.

INFANTICIPATE.
Expecting a baby, a term created by the widely circulated American newspaper columnist
Walter Winchell
in 1934. In Winchell’s world, people didn’t have babies. They “got storked,” or had a “blessed event,” or a “bundle from heaven.” Winchell also takes credit for the state of expecting
infanticipation
.
Winchell wrote the items for his newspaper columns and radio broadcasts in a brash style that influenced other writers. Divorce became
cancellation
or
Reno-vation
; bandleaders were
batoneers
; people in love were
cupiding
.
³

INFRACANINOPHILE.
One who habitually champions the underdog. The creation of American writer
Christopher Morley
(1890–1957).

INTERNATIONAL.
The word
international
was coined by
Jeremy Bentham
(1748–1832) in the book
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
published in 1789. In the very first instance where the term appears, it is aligned with the word
jurisprudence
.
International jurisprudence
is suggested by the author to replace the term
law of nations
, what he deems to be “a misnomer.”

IRON CURTAIN.
The physical and symbolic wall that separated the West from the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. A term made famous by
Sir Winston
Churchill
(1874–1965) on March 5, 1946, at Westminster College in the small Missouri town of Fulton in which he said, “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” The phrase is often stated as having been coined by Churchill but recent evidence presented in
The Yale Book of Quotations
records that the English socialist and feminist
Ethel Snowden
(1880–1951) wrote in her 1920 book
Through Bolshevik Russia
that ‘’we were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!’’ As the editor of
The Yale Book of Quotations
, Fred Shapiro pointed out “Snowden’s meaning, referring to a barrier at the limit of Soviet influence, is the same as the Churchillian one.” Britain’s prime minister during the Second World War, in 1953 Churchill was the first world leader to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His writing included
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, a four-volume narrative and a six-volume history of the Second World War
.
⁴

IRREGULOUS.
Defined by
Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke
in
The Shakespeare Key
in their list of
Shakespeare
an coinages that should be given wider currency. “Shakespeare invented the epithet ‘irregulous’ to express something much more strong than ‘irregular’; something that combines the sense of ‘disorderly,’ ‘lawless,’ ‘licentious,’ as well as ‘anomalous,’ ‘mongrel,’ ‘monstrous’—out of ordinary rule and order in every way.” From
Cymbeline,
act 4, scene 2: “Conspir’d with that
irregulous
devil, Cloten.”
⁵

ISOLATOES.
Term adopted from the Italian by American author
Herman Melville
(1819–1891) in his novel
Moby-Dick
to describe those spiritually isolated from their fellow man. “They were nearly all Islanders on the
Pequod, Isolatoes
too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each
Isolato
living on a separate continent of his own.”

IT.
An intangible quality of sexual attraction that a woman either had or lacked. The creation of novelist
Elinor Glyn
(1864-1943), the term was so commonly applied to Clara Bow that she was called “the
it
girl.” One of Bow’s movies was called simply
It.

IVY LEAGUE.
A group of eight universities in the northeastern United States that are regarded to be among the best in America. Coined by sportswriter
Caswell Adams
in 1937 as a term for the then-powerful eastern football league, it originally included Army and Navy as well. Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale are the colleges of the Ivy League.

J

JAZZ AGE.
American novelist
F. Scott Fitzgerald
is recognized as the voice of the
Jazz Age
, a term he coined retrospectively in his 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age” to refer to the decade after World War I and before the stock market crash in 1929 during which Americans embarked upon what he called “the gaudiest spree in history.” In the essay, Fitzgerald referred to “a whole race going hedonistic.”
The Great Gatsby
, which echoes his relationship with his wife, Zelda Sayre, would go on to be considered one of the best American novels of all time.
¹

JEKYLL AND HYDE.
Describing a person whose moral character and demeanor differs greatly from one situation to the next. It is one of the more powerful and lasting metaphoric references in literature borrowed directly from
Robert Lewis Stevenson
’s 1886 novella
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
in which a decent man, Jekyll, struggles with an evil alter ego, Hyde.

JOCK.
Short for jockstrap, which appears in
Bernard Malamud
’s
(1914–1986)
The Natural
: “He located his jock, with two red apples in it, swinging from a cord.” It is later that the word becomes synonymous with school and college athletes. It is first reported in
American Speech
in 1963.
²

JUNKY.
Worthless. A
George Orwell
ian neologism of 1946 that appears in his
Collection of Essays
“The kind of junky books . . . that accumulate in the bottoms of cupboards.”

JUVESCENSE.
The state of becoming young; the spring of the year. Created by American-born poet and publisher
T. S. Eliot
(1888–1965) in 1920 in the line from the poem “Gerontion”: “In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger.” Anthony Burgess in a 1989 review of the second edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary
calls the term a solecism and writes of Eliot and the
OED:
“He was wrong; it should be ‘juvenescence.’ His authority prevails, and we can dishonor Latin etymology as we wish. The
OED
bestows the right.”
³

K

KELEMENOPY.
Word created by poet
John Ciardi
(1916-1986) that appears in his
Browser’s Dictionary
. It is “a sequential straight line through the middle of everything leading nowhere.” It is based on the k-l-m-n-o-p sequence of the midalphabet.

KICKSHAW.
Variously, a fancy dish, a trinket, a gewgaw, a trifle. In 2003 when the
Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter
published Michael Macrone’s long list of terms coined by
Shakespeare
, a reader wrote a letter to complain of an omission that read in part: “The article only omits one favorite of mine, much in evidence at cocktail parties in the 1930s in the United Kingdom—‘kickshaws’—now more often referred to, less attractively, as ‘nibbles.’ Some supposed it to be a leftover from the Indian Raj and it often came as a surprise that the word was first used by Shakespeare. This was in 1597 in 2 Henry IV v. 1, ‘a joint of Mutton and any pretty little kick-shawes,’ meaning something elegant but insubstantial, from the French
quelquechose
. Shakespeare also uses the word in 12th Night (1.3), not of nibbles, but of ‘maskes etc.’ ‘Art thou good at these kicksechawses?’”
¹

KINSPIRIT.
A fellow enthusiast; one impassioned with the same zeal or hobby or enthusiasm. It is the
blend of
kindred
and
spirit
created by American journalist, novelist, essayist, and poet
Christopher Morley
: “We rather like the look of it; it has a droll, benign, elfish appearance as we put it down.”

Morley worked to get wide acceptance for the word by periodically writing about it in his column for the
New York
Evening Post
, but to little avail. More than twenty-five years after the coinage, Morley told the editor of
Word Study
that he had been able to “get it into small circulation here and there.”
²